Roughly 20 percent of the flights destined for New York City's LaGuardia, New Jersey's Newark and Philadelphia were canceled, the site said.

New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport suspended operations as the city's three major airports prepared hundreds of cots to accommodate stranded travelers. Boston's Logan International Airport said that up to a quarter of its scheduled flights had been canceled on Thursday.

Every minute of delay costs carriers $78.17, according to trade group Airlines for America. (By comparison, each minute of a passenger's time is worth about 66 cents, according to the group's data).

The nor'easter—which brought plummeting temperatures that reached minus 8 degrees in Burlington, Vt., early Friday with a wind chill of 29 below zero—dumped 23 inches of snow in Boxford, Mass., by early Friday and 18 inches in parts of western New York near Rochester. Thirteen inches of snow fell in Boston, while Lakewood, N.J., got 10 inches and New York City got up to 7.

Airport-tracking outlets like the Twitter account NYCAviation reported multiple airlines were having difficulty trying to land flights that had not been canceled or diverted.